


Bibliography

by jediseagull



Category: Howl's Moving Castle - All Media Types
Genre: Awkward Flirting, F/M, POV Alternating, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 05:29:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8877790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jediseagull/pseuds/jediseagull
Summary: In which the Wizard Howl attempts to say something with books, and things do not go according to plan.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [empyrean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/empyrean/gifts).



> Thanks to P for being a cheerleader, sounding board, and beta for two years running. You are a true Yuletide hero <3
> 
> Happy holidays to empyrean! I was so excited to write this for you, and I hope you enjoy it.

_Songs and Sonnets_ , John Donne

Afterwards, Howl had needed to go back to Wales first thing, which of course meant he put it off as long as possible. But with Suliman and Prince Justin dispatched to Kingsbury, Sophie’s friends and family packed off to Market Chipping with Michael as an escort, and Sophie herself looking increasingly like she was about to sit him down and make him have a rather terrifying conversation, explaining himself to Megan suddenly seemed like the lesser feat. “I should-” he said, “My sister’s family-” And then he fled. 

It wasn’t his proudest moment, certainly, but it had occurred to him - along with the unfamiliar sensation of hearing his heartbeat pounding in his own ears - that he was experiencing a depth of emotion which was bad for his health - or at the very least his dignity, and then there was nothing for it but to continue down the garden path and let Megan shout at him until they both felt better.

He’d had to explain to her about the magic, too, and about Michael being his apprentice and Sophie his - only what precisely she was, he didn’t quite know. They hadn’t exactly gone about this in the usual way. Megan hadn’t pressed him on it, but when he’d gone out for a walk past the bookstore and found himself returning with an unexpected purchase, she’d made him turn it over before he could botch the job of trying to gift-wrap it. “It’s for that Sophie of yours, isn’t it,” she’d said keenly, and Howl had relinquished it rather than try to explain that she wasn’t _his_ Sophie. Yet.

Even with his guarantees that the Witch of the Waste was gone for good, it was several days before Mari unlatched herself from his kneecaps and let him leave with tearier eyes and a wobblier lip than usual. By the time he returned to the castle it was dark, and Sophie was no more than a softly breathing lump under a mound of blankets. 

Calcifer, however, perked up when he entered. “What’s that you’ve got there?” he whispered. He seemed quite content to stay in the fireplace for as long as the weather remained damp, but he was no less of an insatiable gossip for having gotten his freedom. It was only Howl’s description of his homeland’s climate that had dissuaded him from coming to Wales; that, and Howl’s threat to keep him in an emergency lantern for the duration, so as to not frighten Howl’s family.

“A birthday present,” said Howl. “Shush.” And then he took himself - quietly - away to bed.

Megan always did have a deft hand with wrapping paper. But as soon as Sophie saw the tidy parcel he had - so thoughtfully! - left on the downstairs table the next morning, she frowned suspiciously - at it, at him, and at Calcifer, snoring away in the grate, just for good measure.

Howl, who had had quite a bit of practice sailing obliviously past the worst of Sophie’s disapproving frowns, ignored it. “Go on, then,” he said, rocking back and forth on his heels. “One year closer towards being the old biddy you wish you still were.”

“It’s not my birthday,” Sophie said, but she pulled the gift towards herself anyways. “You’ve got me mixed up with Martha and Michael’s engagement party, and what on earth are we supposed to get them now?”

“I have complete faith in your ability to harass some poor shopkeep into giving us a bargain on the way there,” said Howl. “Open it.”

She did.

“Oh, no,” she said firmly, as soon as she unwrapped it to find a slim brown volume, title embossed into its leather cover. She flipped to the offending page and rolled her eyes. “Absolutely not.”

“But -”

“Being a sore winner is one of your least attractive traits,” Sophie said. She sounded quite severe, though Howl fancied he wasn’t imagining the hint of fondness in her tone. “And I think we’ve had enough poetry around here for twelve lifetimes.”

“My - Sophie,” Howl began, and sputtered around a word that got stuck in his throat. Sophie, with uncharacteristic clumsiness, dropped the book into the grate.

“I beg your pardon!” she squawked, blushing harder than Howl had known she could.

“I said, my - Sophie!” Howl tried, and clutched at his uncooperative vocal cords with increasing desperation as they failed to produce any flowering endearments.

“Mmm,” Calcifer mumbled around the crackling, curling edges of paper. “Yum.”

Howl glared at him. Honesty was all well and good when lives were on the line, but Calcifer seemed utterly unconcerned that all Howl’s plans had just been thrown into utter disarray.

(Sophie’s magic, as it turned out, was rather liberal in its understanding of what counted as “poetry”. He wasn’t going to be able to use adjectives for _weeks_.)

  


_A Treatise on Hat-Making and Felting_ , John Thomson

“So when are you going to get married to that wizard of yours?” Martha said, and, “Ouch!” when Sophie’s pin slipped to deliver a sharp prick to her shoulder.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business, you nosy thing,” said Sophie.

“Oh, don’t go giving us that crock about being the eldest,” Lettie chimed in. “You’ve already found your fortune, and saved the kingdom besides.”

“I wasn’t going to say a word about being eldest,” said Sophie. “Hold _still_ , Martha.” Magic was all well and good, but an occasion like your youngest sister’s wedding deserved a handmade touch. She stuck the last pin in the lacy cap of the sleeve and said, “There!”

They took a few moments to look at Martha, resplendent in her white gown. She looked terribly grown-up, and Sophie quashed the oncoming tears with utter ruthlessness. Lettie had no such compunctions, sniffling and blowing her nose loudly in a white handkerchief. “We’ll have to get yours tailored somewhere, of course,” she said when she was finished, as though the past few seconds had involved an entirely different conversation than the one Sophie remembered.

“No, thank you,” Sophie said. “Alright, let’s get it off so I can finish working on it.”

Martha wiggled out of the bodice and caught the gown before it could fall to the floor. “All we’re saying is that you ought to consider it. You’re the talk of Ingary, you know, but sooner or later people will start to wonder why you haven’t made an honest man out of him.”

“And I shall tell them that it’s none of their business, either,” Sophie said unrepentantly. She had already - very literally - made an honest man out of Howl Jenkins, thank you very much, and given Howl’s slitherer-outer tendencies, that ought to be quite enough for anyone. He had asked her to live happily ever after, and though Howl did have a way of making everything far more complicated than it needed to be, she _was_ happy.

“Is that yours?” asked Lettie suddenly.

“Is what mine,” said Sophie, though it came out rather like _ih-wha-mai_. She had stuck two pins between her teeth so she could take the gown from Martha. The silk would crumple if she didn’t get it back on the dress form, and there was no time to look for her pincushion.

“That,” Lettie said again, entirely unhelpful.

“That _what_?”

“That book,” said Lettie, and pointed at the table in Fanny’s parlor where Sophie, quite without realizing it, must have set her pincushion.

“Aha!” she said, and replaced the pins. She had learned at an early age that leaving stray pins about when one had younger sisters was a recipe for finding them in the oddest places. Though neither Martha nor Lettie were of the age where they would get caught putting pins in Sophie’s stockings drawer, old habits were difficult to break. Only then did she move the cushion and lift the book up - though calling it a book was generous. It was more of a pamphlet with ambitions, and as familiarly dull as the subject matter was, glancing through its pages stirred no memories.

Funny, too; she couldn’t seem to recall it being there when she’d put the pincushion down. Then again, she couldn’t recall putting the pincushion down in the first place, and wasn’t that just typical?

“It must be Fanny’s,” said Sophie. “Perhaps she bought it some time ago and never got around to throwing it out?”

All three sisters considered this for a moment.

“No,” said Martha.

“Definitely not,” said Lettie.

Sophie had to admit that didn’t sound like Fanny, whose interest in hats had always been firmly focused on whether or not she looked good in one. They’d all been glad to be free of the hat shop in the end. “Or perhaps it belongs to one of the housemaids,” she said pragmatically. “It’s not mine, anyways, so we’d best leave it here.”

It was the work of minutes to hem the cap sleeves, and by the time she’d finished Sophie had already put the little booklet out of her mind. “Now, you’ll stay crisp and clean through the wedding,” she told the gown, putting her hands on her hips for extra emphasis. “Not a spot or spill or wrinkle on you, do you hear?”

The dress practically glowed. “Lovely,” said Sophie, and that, she didn’t need to make a command.

Howl was sprawled across an armchair when she returned to the moving castle, which meant that he had been waiting for her.

“I’m back,” said Sophie. “And the gown is finished, so there. How is Michael’s suit coming along?”

“As you see,” said Howl, and gestured to the perfectly pressed blue-and-gold suit hanging against the back wall. It did look quite smart, not that Sophie was about to tell him that. Upon second glance it actually appeared to be levitating; most likely Howl had used all the spare clothes hangers again. She could see he was trying hard to observe her reaction while seeming completely indifferent to it. The end result was that he looked slightly wall-eyed.

“Michael will be happy,” she said as a compromise between honesty and the need to keep Howl’s smugness in check. “Is he around? I wanted to talk to him about boutonnieres.”

“He’s off looking at houses,” Howl said sulkily. This had been a point of contention between them since the moment Michael proposed, the competing arguments being that Howl could not teach a student who wasn’t around to be taught, and that the moving castle was no place to raise one child, let alone ten.

Howl wasn’t wrong, of course, but Sophie thought that Michael had a point, too, though the castle was homey in its own clutter-filled way. The real issue was that neither of them was quite willing to confess that they would miss the other, and so Howl made pointed comments and Michael sulked, or Michael went off to look at houses and Howl sulked.

Perhaps that was why, when Howl asked, “And how was your afternoon?” he gave off the impression that he would like nothing more than for someone to share in his misery.

“Wonderful,” said Sophie. “It was nice to spend some time with Martha and Lettie after everything that’s happened. I feels like I haven’t properly seen them in months.”

Howl looked even grumpier. “So nothing interesting happened at all, did it?”

Sophie thought for a moment. Certainly nothing had happened that would be of interest to Howl; he had left Wales to escape the tedium of an unmagical, everyday life, and though he made an effort now – sometimes – to pretend to care about such things, Sophie was glad, deep down, that having his heart back hadn’t made him any more sensible or ordinary.

“No,” she said. “Except that sewing is hungry work. I’m going to eat a mountain of sandwiches.”

“Egg salad again?” Howl asked pathetically. He really must have been quite upset by Michael’s imminent departure, Sophie realized. He didn’t even try to convince her that he’d fed the last of it to Calcifer.

She took pity on him. “Roast beef,” she said, and though it didn’t entirely erase the frown lines on his forehead, the aura of gloom grew noticeably lighter.

“I suppose I could be persuaded to have one or two,” said Howl.

  


_Devil’s Cub_ , Georgette Heyer

Nothing was working.

Howl felt like kicking himself. After all, he’d spent the past several months watching Sophie make a hash of every plan she’d known about and quite a few she hadn’t. Of course she wouldn’t do what he’d expected – no matter how much he wished she’d stop tromping through his clever schemes and do what she was supposed to for once.

This, he was beginning to realize, was an absolutely futile hope. It didn’t matter how many spells he put in place. Accomplishing the impossible in the most inconvenient way was Sophie’s stock in trade, followed only by a complete obliviousness to what was right in front of her. She hadn’t even known she had magic, for goodness’ sake; little wonder she hadn’t noticed the book he’d transported to Fanny’s end table. He would simply have to try something different. Something less subtle, more dramatic. Something she couldn’t possibly ignore.

If only he could figure out _what_.

“You nitwit,” said Calcifer. He sounded altogether too pleased by Howl’s despair. “You could just tell her you’d like her to stay, you know.”

“That is completely ridiculous,” said Howl, “Considering she already lives in the castle. All I’m trying to do is give her a birthday gift.”

“You’re still on about that?” said Calcifer. “It’s the middle of February.”

“So?” said Howl.

Calcifer crackled meanly. He did not need to say that Sophie’s birthday was in November. But it was true that buying a book on hat-making was an odd gift for someone who’d clearly taken no joy from the business. Howl had thought - well, Sophie was still close to her family. He’d thought she would appreciate the reminders of her past, and of their shared adventures - but then, she’d spent most of her life before the castle a timid and resigned little thing, and the majority of the time after it under a curse. 

Maybe - just maybe - he’d been going about this the wrong way.

As a rule, Howl didn’t like to think about the future. It was bad for his skin, and he’d already found a blemish on his forehead after the latest not-quite-a-row with Michael. 

But ignoring whatever foolish notion Calcifer had gotten in his head about Sophie leaving, the fact of the matter was that they both owed her a rather significant debt. It was, therefore, practically an obligation that he encourage her pursuit of what would make her happiest, even though the spot on his forehead throbbed suspiciously as he began to ponder what, precisely, that might be.

“You’re making that face again,” said Calcifer.

It wasn’t the hat shop, he could see that now. Nor was Sophie the sort to rest on the laurels of a past victory. She could, he supposed, follow in the path of her youngest sister, Michael’s not-actually-Lettie - but no, as soon as the thought was in his head he dismissed it. No, that wouldn’t do at all.

When he’d built the castle, he’d had to construct an entirely new set of spells around it. The trunk that sat at the foot of his bed was one of his earliest trials of a piece of that magic, enchanted to fit one space inside another of a completely different size: in this case, his own personal library inside a box no bigger than a traveling chest. He riffled through it now, tossing aside books one after the other. 

Sophie needed excitement. She needed adventure. She needed - “Got it,” said Howl triumphantly.

“Got what?” Calcifer had traversed the stairs up to his bedroom and hovered over Howl’s shoulder, peering at the text. He _would_ take excessive delight in snooping now that he was finally free of the fireplace, Howl thought, but it was only worse when you tried to put him off.

“A birthday gift,” he said.

Of course, it wouldn’t do for Sophie to realize who the origin of the present was. When the courier in Kingsbury rang the bell the next morning, Howl was firmly ensconced in front of the bathroom mirror.

This was not a particularly impressive feat. For one thing, Howl was the one who’d paid the man to deliver his parcel, albeit while wearing the non-equine cloak of disguise. For another, given the length of time it took to make himself look up to snuff, it would have been far more improbable for him to _not_ be in the bathroom at any given moment between the hours of eight and noon.

He paused in the middle of moisturizing his skin to listen at the door, but there was only the popping sound of Calcifer pretending to be a fire. Finding that insufficient for his purposes, he muttered a quick spell over a curler, stuck one end against his ear and the other back against the door, and reapplied himself to eavesdropping the way only a wizard with power to spare could.

“-And I’m telling you, I didn’t order anything, my lad,” Sophie said.

The courier, who was a well-pressed fellow of about thirty-five, insisted that nevertheless, the package was to be delivered to the care of a Miss Sophie Hatter at this address, and she was Sophie Hatter, was she not?

To which Sophie could only say, “Oh, dash it all. Give it here, then.” The courier did. The door closed with a final thump, which nearly muffled the sound of Sophie tearing through the brown parcel paper.

And then there was quiet, because even magic cannot hear someone’s eyes speeding across the written word.

Cautiously, Howl returned to his toilette.

“Goodness,” Sophie said quite abruptly, about half an hour later. “Would you say swapping with your sister to prevent an improper elopement is more or less foolish than swapping so you can learn magic and she can find a nice boy to have ten children with?”

“Ten?” Calcifer asked skeptically. He must have been reading along with her. “That sounds like a great deal of children.”

“So elopement is less foolish than ten, more foolish than five,” agreed Sophie, and they fell silent once more.

“What a scoundrel,” she said after a few more minutes had passed. “Completely thoughtless of this poor girl!”

“Isn’t that the point?” said Calcifer.

“How so?” asked Sophie.

“She wouldn’t try to protect her sister from an honorable man,” said Calcifer. “You notice nobody is swooping in to beat Michael over the head with a handbag.”

“I would never,” Sophie said primly.

“No, you used a stick,” said Calcifer.

“On Miss Angorian.”

This time, the tone of Calcifer’s guttural crackle-hiss was more delighted than cruel, and exuberant enough that the castle had almost certainly acquired a newly-singed floorboard. “Does that make Howl the fair maiden in question?”

“The scoundrel, more like,” said Sophie. “He certainly enjoys his flirtations, though I’m not sure Howl would ever whisk his lady love off to parts unknown.”

Calcifer coughed out something that sounded distinctly like ‘Wales’, and really, wasn’t it so convenient that Howl’s well-being was no longer linked to his fire demon’s?

But for once, Sophie’s obliviousness came in handy. “After all,” she continued, “We both know how he feels about situations he can’t slither out of.”

“I guess,” said Calcifer. “Can you turn the page? I want to find out what happens next.”

It was another two hours before he was fully washed, dressed, and coiffed, which meant that Howl exited the bathroom just in time to see Sophie close the book with a satisfying thump.

“Hullo,” he said. “What’ve you got there?”

“A misdelivery,” said Sophie.

“I thought it was a misdirection,” said Calcifer. The bucket of water sprouting bulbs in the kitchen sink was looking more tempting by the second.

“Or a mystery,” said Sophie. “Someone sent this to me, but there’s no return address and I’m quite sure I didn’t order it myself.”

“A book?” said Howl.

“Not my usual fare,” said Sophie. “Romance, adventure. All very dramatic. You’d probably enjoy it.”

Howl’s heart made a peculiar sort of protest in his chest, like it had drank too much whiskey and then tried to go parasailing. “You didn’t?”

“No, I did,” said Sophie. Her cheeks glowed in the light of Calcifer's proximity. “Though I’d have found it incredibly far-fetched a year ago, you know. Mistaken identities, foreign lands, and at the end of it they manage a wedding and their happily-ever-after?” She laughed, as if she still found the idea ludicrous; two people actually achieving matrimonial bliss after such a tumultuous beginning.

There was an uncomfortable parallel there. He didn’t much care for it.

“Ha,” said Howl weakly.

Sophie shook her head. “Anyways, speaking of weddings, I meant to talk to you about Michael. The castle doesn’t use the entirety of the house in Market Chipping; I don’t see why Martha and Michael can’t have the rest of it.”

“You want to put their flat where the castle isn’t?” said Howl. “It’d be a tricky bit of magic.”

“The king tried to make you his Royal Wizard,” said Sophie. “And in case you’d forgotten, I beat the Witch of the Waste’s fire demon over the head with my walking stick. I think we can do it.”

The newlyweds would have their own home, and his apprentice would be right next door. It was a tidy solution indeed. Clever, too, in the sort of straightforward way that Howl had never had a knack for.

Still, he pretended the need to consider it, while Sophie very politely pretended to act as though he might say anything other than yes. “I suppose if it will stop Michael’s griping. What did you have in mind?”

It was, he reflected, an even tidier way to change the subject. _Speaking of weddings_ , she’d said, yet Sophie had made no effort to force him to have the conversation he’d left half-finished the day they vanquished Miss Angorian. Perhaps she’d stopped believing they could have a happy ending. Perhaps she had never really believed it, and that was why she didn’t seem to care that Howl had made no movement towards formalizing their - whatever they had - the way everyone else seemed to be doing.

But she had said _we_.

If he had been a nobler man, or one inclined to the sort of martyrdom that was less tragic posing and more _ow-those-are-my-entrails-on-the-floor_ , Howl might still have left it there. There were plenty of women who would have married him in a heartbeat for less than the promise of a happily-ever-after, and if Sophie Hatter didn’t count herself among their number, then -

Then Howl was simply going to have to try harder to convince her that he’d meant it. Every single word.

  


_The Marvelous Secrets of the Natural and Cabalistic Magic of Little Albert_ , Albertus Parvus Lucius

Howl had insisted they work through the spells for the flat upside down and sideways before attempting anything, but in the end it had been as simple as marking some symbols in chalk on the wall and stepping through it as though it was a doorway. Then they were inside the dining room of the Hatters’ old house, bare of furniture but still wallpapered in the floral pattern Sophie remembered. She could see the staircase to the upper floor on the other side, too, and she’d only had to muse aloud how nice it would be for these rooms to be a home again before the walls were creaking and groaning obligingly. By the time she’d turned around, Howl had released the magic on the doorway-that-wasn’t - because it was, now, a brass-knobbed affair with a slot for the post and a sturdy mat for stomping the mud off one’s boots right inside.

“Beautiful,” Howl had pronounced, and Sophie had found she quite agreed.

Nothing else had changed about the external structure, and when Howl had opened the door and waved her through, there were no panicking townsfolk, though she'd noticed one or two people giving her a curious second glance.

That was ordinary, these days. She’d had to come to terms with it the first time she had walked through Market Chipping in the aftermath of the Witch of the Waste. “It’s good to see you back,” Mrs. Cesari had said, and though it was the sort of pleasant statement one made to an acquaintance who had been out of town, something about it had felt incorrect. She was back, yes - and yet she wasn’t, not really. Not the Sophie Hatter Mrs. Cesari had known.

Mrs. Cesari had continued - in the tone of voice that suggested she wanted very much to ask what in the world Sophie was going to do with herself now - to remark that it was a shame there was no one else who made hats quite so fine, though of course the flowers were lovely. Sophie did seem to have a talent for these things, didn’t she? And her magic must certainly help.

So the news had inexorably spread.

Of course it would, Sophie thought, tugging her morning trolley full of flowers from the Waste into the castle. Wizards were worth their weight in gold as far as the gossips were concerned, and throwing in a wicked witch and a cursed prince on top of that meant that Miss Angorian had hardly had the chance to disintegrate before the story had spread halfway across the country. It was more inevitability than rotten luck that some of those stories happened to mention a second witch helping the Wizard Howl, and that a few shrewd observers - by which Sophie was referring to Mrs. Fairfax - had quickly made it known that the witch in question was young Sophie Hatter from down the lane.

She didn’t mind, not really, though it was odd the first time she’d had a customer thrust a bouquet in her face and ask, “But what does it _do_?” This was mostly the case because the flowers planted by Wizard Suliman didn’t actually do anything at all. That was, they brightened up a sitting room or kitchen table, but they had absolutely no magical properties whatsoever.

Of course, if her experience with the Count of Catterack had been anything to go by, that didn’t really matter when Sophie’s own talents got involved. Often it was enough to mutter a few words over the ribbon tying an arrangement together. All for the best; that was frequently all she had time for. The shop had had more custom now that everyone knew there was a witch working its counter, and that wasn’t even counting the daily gaggle of young ladies hoping the Wizard Howl might steal their hearts.

But Howl had been busy since Miss Angorian’s demise - and legitimately so, for once. It turned out there were some benefits to giving a falling star your heart. Howl was no less skilled at magic than he was before, but without Calcifer to borrow power from he did tire much more quickly. In the weeks after, he’d spent most of his time doing what appeared to be the wizard’s equivalent of press-ups, rebuilding reserves that he hadn’t needed to draw upon in years.

Sophie unlocked the side door to the shop and pushed it open into cacophonous disarray. Flowers bloomed in tangled riots of color, and at least one ambitious pot of baby’s breath had made serious progress towards becoming a full-grown shrub.

She sighed. Unfortunately, all the excess magic had made some of her own experiments go a bit haywire. Under the usual circumstances there was very little carryover from the living quarters of the castle to the shop proper, but she had a strong sense that Howl’s frustration was getting to him. He was the sort of person for whom everything came easily, and so he’d never quite learned how to cope when something _didn’t_.

He was trying, still. There had even been an attempt to clip back the plants encroaching on her workspace, though she saw the shears clutched triumphantly in the vines of what might have once been a begonia before it decided it would rather grow like ivy instead. And there was a book there too, with a hand-penned note on top that read, _Maybe you’ll have better luck with it._

It was one of the basic spell books Michael used. From the sharp angle of Howl’s letters she could tell that he was upset and trying to hide it, and Sophie experienced an echoing pang.

The more she thought about it, he hadn’t been himself since he’d come back from Wales. Quarreling with Michael was one thing, but plying her with presents? At first, she’d assumed he was trying to win her over to his side of the argument as Michael’s confidante and Martha’s older sister. Yet the argument was resolved, the wedding was in a few short weeks, and Howl was - however slowly - relearning the limits of his human heart. By rights they _were_ living happily ever after, just as he’d said they would.

But Howl wasn’t happy.

Sophie turned to the index of the spell book, tracing her finger down the lines until she hit the right one. 

She put the bright red poppy blossom in the top buttonhole of her dress and the iron filings in her pocket, and then she went to the door of the castle. “I’m looking for something,” she said firmly, addressing her words to the knob set into the lintel. “You’re going to open to a place I can find it.” Slowly, gaining speed, the knob began to turn until the colors all blurred together. The door swung open.

“Thank you,” said Sophie, because it never hurt to be polite. Then she walked forward into the darkness.

  


_Atlas of the World (5th Ed.)_ , National Geographic Society

“What do you mean, she’s _disappeared_?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Calcifer fired back, flaring up with distress. “I’d gone out to the marshes and when I came back she was gone. And I looked, she’s not anywhere in Market Chipping!”

“She could have gone a bit farther, if she’d taken the boots,” said Howl, but the seven-league boots were in the cupboard where he’d kept them. “Maybe Kingsbury, through the door?”

“She wouldn’t have left on her own,” Calcifer said stubbornly. Howl wished, sudden and desperate, for a measure of the fire demon’s surety. “Can’t you do something to find her?”

“I can try,” said Howl. He pulled down a map of the kingdom, first, and cast a location spell on it, but the paper stayed blank. “Wait,” he said, and ran upstairs. The atlas of his own world was battered from its days of being carted back and forth to his high school geography class, but the pages were intact enough for him to recast the spell.

Calcifer hovered so low that he nearly set the whole book on fire, staring anxiously at it. “Nothing’s happening.”

Howl swore and cast the spell again. Nothing.

“What are you doing?”

He yelped as Calcifer singed his ear, the both of them turning too quickly to really coordinate it.

“Sophie!”

“Hello,” said the woman in question. “What on earth’s the matter with you?”

Calcifer and Howl exchanged a glance. “Nothing,” said Calcifer.

“Wondering where you’d gotten to,” added Howl.

“I have no idea, actually,” said Sophie, and hefted a package nearly the length of her forearm. “But I have a present for you.”

“For me?”

“Yes,” said Sophie, “I thought it was about time I reciprocated.”

“Reciprocated?” said Howl, feeling like a parrot.

“You’ve been trying to make sure I get my happily-ever-after,” she said, poking him in the chest with her free hand. “You keep forgetting that it was supposed to be _ours_.”

“Oh,” said Howl. He thought he might need to sit down, but Sophie was still smiling at him. He found himself entirely unable to step away. “Oh,” he said again. “May I kiss you now?”

“I think it’s going to be the other way around,” she said, and it was.

“You’ll have to marry me, you know,” he said when they separated, and somehow the words that had seemed so terrifying came easily with Sophie’s fingers still twined in his, the memory of her warmth filling him from the inside out.

“I wasn’t sure if it was that you were worried about my reputation or just overcomplicating things as usual,” she said. “But in case it wasn’t clear: the answer is yes.”

  


( _The Book of Amun-Ra_ , unknown)

The tome she had found in the ether between worlds was glorious, bound in what appeared to be solid gold plates.

“Call it an engagement present,” she said.

“Well,” said Howl, and lit up both literally and figuratively as he accepted it from her hands, Calcifer bobbling closer to peer over his shoulder. “Now this is an odd bit of skullduggery, isn’t it?”

“It’s a spell book,” she said. “I don’t know that it’ll be any help, of course, but I thought-”

He glanced up at her and oh, dear. She knew that look, surprise and pleasure and a gleeful sort of curiosity blazing in his eyes. “Sophie,” he said. “How do you feel about pyramids?”

“I don’t know,” she said, smiling back. Calcifer had made himself scarce, though she hadn't noticed him leaving. “But I suppose I’m about to get the chance to find out.”

After a bit of finagling and a hop, skip, and a jump - through _time_ , if you could believe it, though she wasn’t sure she did - the two of them poured out in a rather undignified manner onto a blazing stretch of sand. The sun beat down something fierce overhead, and Howl yelped and immediately flung his arms over his face.

Sophie thought that was probably sensible of him. He was as pasty as marble, he’d be all peeling and red in no time flat if he didn’t get to some shade.

In the distance off to the left was a towering structure that rose to a point, so tall it was practically a mountain. Before them loomed a temple of pale gray stone, eerie and silent except for the whistling wind.

“Ready?” said Howl.

She took his hand, and felt his fingers squeeze once around her own. The future stretched out before them, as boundless as the desert. “For our happily-ever-after?” she said. “Always.”

**Author's Note:**

> All of these books are real and would have existed at the time of the publication of _Howl's Moving Castle_....except the last one, which is blatantly stolen from that paragon of modern film, _The Mummy_.


End file.
